A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

3. The Reformers declare that Christ is the only Revealer of God. “We would never recognise the Father's grace and mercy,” says Luther in his Large Catechism, “were it not for our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the mirror [pg 478] of the Father's heart.” “We are not affrayed to cal God our Father,” says the Scots Confession, “not sa meikle because He has created us, quhilk we have in common with the reprobate, as for that He has given us His onely Son.” The instructions issued by the Synod which met at Bern in 1532 are very emphatic upon this thought, as may be seen from the headings of the various articles: (Art. 2) That the whole doctrine is the unique Christ (Das die gantze leer der eynig Christus sye); (Art. 3) That God is revealed to the people in Christ alone; (Art. 5) That the gracious God is perceived through Christ alone without any mediation; (Art. 6) A Christian sermon is entirely about and from Christ. It is said under the third article: “His Son in Whom we see the work of God and His Fatherly heart toward us ... which is not the case where the preacher talks much about God in the heathen manner, and does not exhibit the same God in the face of Christ.”[434] The Confessions also unite in declaring that the gift of the Holy Spirit comes from Christ.

4. The conception that Christ filled the whole sphere of God, which was for the Reformers a fundamental and experimental fact, enabled them to construct a spiritual doctrine of the sacraments which they opposed to that held in the mediæval Church. Of course, it was various theories about the sacraments which caused the chief differences among the Reformers themselves; but apart from all varying ideas—consubstantiation, ubiquity, signs exhibiting and signs representing—the Reformers united on the thoughts that the efficacy in the sacraments depended entirely on the promises of Christ contained in His word, and that the virtue in the sacraments consisted in the presence of Christ to the believing communicant. What was received in the sacraments was not a vague, mysterious, not to say magical, grace, but Christ Jesus Himself. He gave Himself in the sacraments in whatever way His presence might be explained.

They all taught that the efficacy of the sacraments depends upon the promise of Christ contained in their [pg 479] institution, and they insisted that word and sacrament must always be taken together. Thus Luther points out in the Babylonish Captivity of the Church that one objection to the Roman practice is that the recipients “never hear the words of the promise which are secretly mumbled by the priest,” and exhorts his readers never to lose sight of the all-important connection between the word of promise and the sacraments; and in his Large Catechism he declares that the sacraments include the Word. “I exhort you,” he says, “never to sunder the Word and the water, or to separate them. For where the Word is withheld we have only such water as the maid uses to cook with.” Non-Lutheran Confessions are equally decided on the necessity of connecting the promise and the words of Christ with the sacraments. The Thirty-nine Articles declare that the sacraments are effectual because of “Christ's institution and promise.” The Heidelberg or Palatine Catechism (1563) says that the sacraments “are holy and visible signs ordained of God, to the end that He might thereby the more fully declare and seal unto us the promise of the Holy Gospel.”

Similarly the Reformers unanimously declared that the virtue in the sacraments consisted in no mysterious grace, but in the fact that in them believing partakers met and received Christ Himself. In the articles of the Bern Synod (1532) we are told that the sacraments are mysteries of God, “through which from without Christ is proffered to believers.” The First Helvetic Confession (1536) says, concerning the Holy Supper, “we hold that in the same the Lord truly offers His Body and His Blood, that is, Himself, to His own.” The Second Helvetic Confession (1562) declares that “the Body of Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father,” and enjoins communicants “to lift up their hearts and not to direct them downwards to the bread. For as the sun, though absent from us in the heaven, is none the less efficaciously present ... so much more the Sun of righteousness absent from us in the heavens in His Body, is present to us not indeed corporeally, but spiritually by a life-giving activity.” The French Confession of 1557 says that [pg 480] the sacraments are pledges and seals, and adds, “Yet we hold that their substance and truth is in Jesus Christ.” So the Scots Confession of 1560 declares that “we assuredlie beleeve that be Baptisme we ar ingrafted in Christ Jesus to be made partakers of His justice, be quhilk our sinnes ar covered and remitted. And alswa, that in the Supper richtlie used, Christ Jesus is so joined with us, that Hee becummis very nurishment and fude of our saules.” In the Manner of the Administration of the Lord's Supper the Scottish Reformation Church directed the minister in his exhortation to say to the people: “The end of our coming to the Lord's Table ... is to seek our life and perfection in Jesus Christ, acknowledging ourselves at the same time to be children of wrath and condemnation. Let us consider then that this sacrament is a singular medicine for all poor sick creatures, a comfortable help to weak souls, and that our Lord requireth no other worthiness on our part, but that we unfeignedly acknowledge our naughtiness and imperfection.”

Everywhere in prayer, worship, and teaching the Reformers see Christ filling the whole sphere of God. Jesus was God appearing in history and addressing man.

§ 6. The Church.

In the Epistles of St. Paul, the Church of Christ stands forth as a fellowship which is both divine and human. On the side of the divine it is a fellowship with Jesus, its crucified, risen, and ascended Lord; on the human, it is a fellowship among men who stand in the same relation to Jesus. This fellowship with Jesus and with the brethren is the secret of the Church—what expresses it, what makes it different from all other fellowships. Every other characteristic which belongs to it must be coloured by this thought of a double fellowship. It is the double relation which makes it difficult to construct a conception of the Church. It is easy to feel it as an experience, but it has always been found hard to express it in propositions.

It does not require much elaborate thinking to construct a theory of the Church which will be true to all that is said about the fellowship on its divine side; nor is it very difficult to think of a great visible and historical organisation which in some external aspects represents the Christian fellowship, provided the hidden union with Christ, so prominent in St. Paul's descriptions, be either entirely neglected or explained in external and material ways. The difficulty arises when both the divine and the human sides of the fellowship are persistently and earnestly kept in view.

It is always hard to explain the unseen by the seen, the eternal by the temporal, and the divine by the human; and the task is almost greater than usual when the union of these two elements in the Church of Christ is the theme of discussion. It need not surprise us, therefore, that all down through the Middle Ages there appear, not one, but two conceptions of the Christian Church which never harmonised. On the one side, the Church was thought of as a fellowship of God with man, depending on the inscrutable purpose of God, and independent of all visible outward organisation; on the other, it was a great society which existed in the world of history, and was held together by visible political ties like other societies. Augustine had both conceptions, and the dialectical skill of the great theologian of the West was unable to fuse them into one harmonious whole.